Configuring TFS Work Item Limit

If you're using TFS with the scrum template you may have access to the web access portion, which includes a task board.  This board works as a virtual board where the agile team can see all open bugs, stories, and tasks in various states.  The team can move them, track them, estimate them, etc.  It's actually a pretty cool feature.  We recently found a limitation to the board that I didn't think we'd ever encounter, but we did.  Apparently the task board can have only 500 items on it at any given time, which is usually plenty.  On this particular project, though, we weren't really using the agile method so we had a lot more tasks than that.  When you hit the limit, TFS displays this message:

You might be able to imagine that it is disconcerting when you arrive at work in the morning to see this lovely screen.  The good news is there's a somewhat simple solution and you've found it here.  Without further ado, follow these steps to change the number of items available on the task board.

1. Open a command prompt on your local machine
2. Type in this command without the surrounding quotes: "cd %programfiles(x86)%\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE"
3. Press the key
4. Type in this command without the surrounding quotes: "witadmin exportagileprocessconfig /collection:[collection] /p:[project name] > c:\tfsSettings.xml"
5. Press the key
6. Launch a new instance of Windows Explorer
7. Navigate to C:\
8. Open C:\tfsSettings.xml in Notepad
9. Find the node named IterationBacklog and add an attribute to that node
1. The name of the attribute will be workItemCountLimit
2. The value of the attribute will be whatever limit you want to impose (I chose 800)
10. Save C:\tfsSettings.xml
11. Toggle back to the open command prompt
12. Type in this command without the surrounding quotes: "witadmin importagileprocessconfig /collection:[collection] /p:[project name] /f:C:\tfsSettings.xml"
13. Press the key

That should do it.  There are a couple of items to note about the instructions above, though.

• You have to have rights on the project in order for this to work
• You can find your project and collection names by using the admin portion of the web interface

• In the upper right-hand corner of the page, click the gear icon
• When the admin page opens, click "Control Panel" in the upper left-hand corner of the page
• You will now be looking at the administration portion for the collection, click on the project in the tree beneath the collection
• The main windowpane should now be displaying the Project Name, then the Collection, then the description of the project
• The collection value to use in both commands above is the concatenation of the web interface URL with the collection name
• If the URL of the web interface is http:\\widgetfactory\tfs\developmentgroup and the Collection Name on the admin page is Blogs, the value to use in the command would be http:\\widgetfactory\tfs\developmentgroup\blogs